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 Pascal's Wager: Volume I On August 8th, 2006, my father asked me if I had any CDs that would be good for meditation. I told him that I didn't, but that the library had an entire section dedicated to new age and meditation music. He said that he tried all the CDs they had there (and ones at other local libraries) and that all of them were either not what he was looking for or had weird gimmicks such as overdubbed whale calls or motivational spoken word performances. I figured it would probably take less time to record an entire CD of meditation music for him than it would take to find an appropriate CD, so I sat down right then and recorded myself playing a MIDI keyboard for about an hour. My relationship with piano is one that, at best, falls short of "dilettante". I've picked up a few things here and there from fooling around on piano, although I usually use keyboards as midi sound modules or performance entry of single orchestral instrument lines for movie scoring. That being said, improvising an hour of slow pads didn't seem like an impossible challenge, as long as nobody else would ever have to hear it. After I recorded the MIDI data into the computer, I let my father listen to a number of synthesizer sound presets on which the performance could play back. He was actually much pickier than I thought he'd be, with a very specific sound in mind, and had me create a sound that consisted of 4 multitimbral patches that were either heavily tweaked from other patches or created from scratch. A month or two later, my colleague, Tyler Ventura, asked me if I had any music he could listen to while working. I gave him a copy of the synthesizer music and forgot about it. A year later, I found out that both Tyler and my father were still listening to their CDs on a regular basis and had copied them for other people as well. I decided that I might as well mix it properly and give the record an official release if people were getting so much enjoyment out of it, but my schedule prevented me from doing that until Mid-October of 2009. Given how far of a departure this music is from what I usually do, I'm choosing to catalog any music of a similar nature that I create in the future as subsequent volumes under the title "Pascal's Wager." Without getting too specific, I utilize the title not to conjure any thoughts regarding the existence of a higher power, but rather to illustrate a possible larger picture of a null risk, the precondition in which this record was released. It most definitely does not have any bearing on the music itself, and I hope that other people also find some use for this music. -Brian Peters October 16, 2009 |